In 2015, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued German car giant Volkswagen with a violation notice under the Clean Air Act. The scandal, known as “Dieselgate” caused inflicted enormous damage upon Volkswagen’s worldwide reputation.

In 2019 during a live demonstration of the Tesla Cybertruck’s supposedly shatterproof window technology, the car’s head designer was invited to throw a metal ball at the side window of the vehicle. The window cracked, instantly undermining the Cybertruck’s tough image and raising questions about the car’s perceived durability.

And then there’s perhaps the UK’s best-known example of a single incident destroying a company’s reputation.

Back in the 1990s, Ratners jewellery shops were a familiar sight on high streets up and down the UK.

But then, CEO Gerald Ratner made a speech addressing the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 April 1991.

During his speech, Ratner commented: “We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap.”

In both the VW and Ratners instances, it is easy to see the financial cost of their respective missteps. But what of the unseen cost; the loss of trust; and the incalculable damage to the company’s reputation?

That is a calculation that is probably being done at the Maryland headquarters of ACECO; the demolition contractor that is currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House.

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In January 1978, the Sex Pistols embarked upon a seven-date tour of America. It was a disaster. The band was pelted with beer cans in Dallas, boycotted in Memphis, and hounded by moral outrage at every stop.

By the time they arrived at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the band was imploding amidst infighting; Sid Vicious’ spiralling heroin addiction; and a manager orchestrating the drama like some punk-rock puppet master.

Within days, lead singer Johnny Rotten would quit the band. In October of the same year, Sid Vicious would be arrested for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. He would die of a heroin overdose just months later, in February 1979. He was 21.

But as the band tore through their final encore in San Francisco, Rotten’s frustration boiled over. Kneeling at the edge of the stage, he stared into the crowd, sneered, and delivered a line that brought down the curtain on punk’s most volatile band and, quite possibly, on the punk movement itself:

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

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On 12 September 1962, US President John F. Kennedy rose to his feet at Rice University in Houston, Texas to deliver what would prove to be one of the most memorable speeches in human history.

The speech concluded: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”

Delivered just 13 years after the end of the Second World War, that speech not only set the scene for the coming space race between the US and the Soviet Union; it also encapsulated a post-War ambition in which not challenge was considered too big or too challenging.

In the years and decades that followed, the US and the world achieved things that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. The US put a man on the moon and built an interstate highway network that criss-crossed the nation and brought commerce and inter-connectivity to even the remotest areas.

In the UK, we rebuilt entire cities damaged and destroyed during the war; continued the construction of our motorway network, completing the M1 and then adding the M4, M5 and M6 in relatively quick succession. We also forged a tunnel beneath the sea-bed to link the UK with mainland Europe.

Elsewhere, we have seen buildings grow ever taller, with some now stretching almost a kilometre into the sky.
I am paraphrasing Will McAvoy from The Newsroom here: “We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases. We reached for the stars.”

And then, we didn’t.

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On Saturday, across the vastness of the United States, more than seven million people took to the streets. Across six time zones, from California to Maine, from the deep South to the industrial Midwest, from the tiny towns to the sprawling metropolis of the cities, they gathered beneath banners that read No Kings.

It was, by every measure, a remarkable display of collective will; one of the largest coordinated demonstrations in modern American history. More than seven million citizens, roughly two percent of the nation, united not under a single political banner, but around a shared conviction: that the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump regime must not go unchallenged.

They marched against power abused and promises broken. Against the vilification of migrants and minorities. Against racism and sexism. Against lies peddled as truth and fear repackaged as patriotism.
They marched not because they expected immediate change, but because silence felt like complicity.

The protest spanned all fifty states. There were no borders on Saturday. Just people. Ordinary Americans who decided that enough was enough.

And yet, while millions raised their voices across the Atlantic, here in Britain’s demolition and construction sectors there is silence.

Deafening, obedient silence.

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